In India, the challenge of building 50,000 colleges

Here's a job most 27-year-olds never get: starting up a new university – from scratch. Like an Athenian at the dawn of Greece, Dhawal Sharma is converting 25 acres of farmland outside New Delhi worked by man and ox for millenniums into the kind of marble-and-grass campus that launches odysseys of the mind.

But Mr. Sharma, a recent business-school graduate, is also young enough to still be in a band. He drums in a metal-rock group that plays the songs of 1970s headbangers like Judas Priest.

"I really wonder if any other person who is doing the same job is as inexperienced as I am," says Sharma, who is the project manager for the future Ashoka University. "I've been told this in a number of government offices as well – 'you look too young.' "

The truth is India needs the young, the entrepreneurial – and maybe especially the headbanging cymbal-crashers – to help carry out what may be the most ambitious experiment in higher education in the world today. It may also be the most daunting.

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